You couldn't make it up

Gordon Burn's new novel blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction. Based on the events of last summer, its characters include Kate and Gerry McCann, Gordon Brown, Kate Middleton - and a news-obsessed dog-walker called Gordon Burn. He tells Esther Addley about his urge to get to the heart of the story

'Blair was such a strange, spectral figure that when he went, it was like, after being in your face for 10 years, he just evaporated' ... Gordon Burn. Photograph: Sarah Lee Sarah Lee/Guardian

In 1984, when he was 36, Gordon Burn published his first book, called Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son, an account of the life of the Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe. Obsessed at the time, as he freely admits, by Norman Mailer's Executioner's Song, the ambitious young Geordie writer wanted to achieve what the American had achieved and to emulate what Capote had managed with In Cold Blood - to climb right into a news story and be enveloped by its skin, scraping out every last tiny detail to tell the tale obsessively from the inside out.

And so, in the three years after Sutcliffe's conviction in 1981, he did, turning up after tea, night after night, at the home of the killer's father, John, who would stretch himself out on his sofa, close his eyes and talk for hours about how none of his kids had shared his taste for offal, or about how Peter would cling as a boy to his mother's skirts, or how as a teenager his strange oldest son had a habit of locking himself in the bathroom for hours on end, clipping, clipping, clipping at his boot-black hair.

Burn would return to the "true crime" genre with an equally meticulous telling of the story of Fred and Rosemary West, published in 1998 as Happy Like Murderers. By that stage, though, he had also started writing fiction. Alma Cogan, his first novel, which won him the Whitbread prize, concerned an imagined future for the real-life 1950s recording star in which she did not die in 1966 but lived on into a decaying celebrity half-life, her once famous features echoing and contrasted with the equally famous mug-shot stare of Myra Hindley, the Moors murderer. Fullalove, written while he observed Rose West's trial in Winchester crown court, concerns a seedy, self-loathing tabloid reporter who knows all the worst foot-in-the-door tricks of his trade. Burn has written a twin biography of the two Manchester United geniuses, George Best and Duncan Edwards, one a tragic drunk, the other killed in Munich on the very edge of greatness.

The unifying theme is not hard to determine. "Almost everything I have written," as Burn now says, "has been about celebrity, and how for most people celebrity is a kind of death."

Now, from reporting the news, from imagining alternative futures for those who made it, from creating characters who work within it, Burn has taken his career arc to its logical next stage. His latest book, Born Yesterday, carries the subtitle The News as a Novel, and explicitly sets out to fictionalise real events, both those familiar to consumers of Sky News and the Guardian and the Daily Express, and those personal to Burn himself. Set in the summer of 2007, it is populated by a cast of characters we know well - Kate Middleton, Clarence Mitchell, the Glasgow airport "hero" John Smeaton, Carol Thatcher, Jacqui Smith, the bereaved Iraq campaigner Reg Keys, Fiona Phillips, David Abrahams - its point being, in part, that the instant they appear in the news and take on a reported life, these people immediately become fictions.

This is not really, however, the book I expected. Nor is it quite the book Mark Lawson anticipated, when in December he wrote a piece in this paper inspired by the book's pre-publicity buzz, and highly appreciative of what he assumed would be its insights. "Burn, a notable cultural observer, has, not for the first time, spotted a shift in how the world works," wrote Lawson. "The news has become a kind of super-fiction, in which one unlikely, inexplicable yarn after another - the Portugal Child, the Perugia Murder, the Deadly Teddy Bear, the Secret Donor, the Panamanian Canoeist - play out across newspaper pages."

In fact, says Burn with a sheepish smile, it's not the novel he thought he would write either, not least because at the time of Lawson's preview, Burn hadn't actually started writing it - a revelation that seems appropriately postmodern for a journalist's novel about journalism. "I read his piece, like, twice, and even when I had written the first two chapters I went back to it, thinking, am I doing what he said?"

Born Yesterday might fairly be called the first post-Blair, post-McCanns novel, and it is dominated by those two stories, but it is not, as one might anticipate, a narrative reimagining of the dramatic summers experienced by Tony and Gordon, Gerry and Kate. The main character and narrator, rather, is a dog-walker from Battersea, later revealed to be a writer, who it finally emerges is Burn himself - or a version of him.

This narrator is obsessed, to the point of sleeplessness, with Gordon Brown's blind eye and Robert Murat's blind eye and Madeleine McCann's distinctive iris and the glassy eye of the soft toy on the cover of his own novel, Fullalove; he can't shake thoughts of the doctors who dined with the McCanns on the night Madeleine went missing and the people who tried to blow up Glasgow airport and the London bar Tiger Tiger. Running round and round his brain is the much forwarded clip on YouTube of a little girl, not so very different in age and looks from Madeleine, sobbing and sobbing because Blair had been replaced with Brown. "Nooooooo! Where is he? I love Tony Blair!"

"It was a terrible summer," Burn writes in the book, "and a peculiar time. It was a time that found its symbol in the [new] prime minister's anxiety-shrouded, tortured tombstone grin. It hurt to smile ... An analogue politician in a digital age. Old Gordon."

Burn is not a showy writer, nor a showy person. In photographs he can give the appearance of being stern, but he is not at all in person. If anything, I suspect he may be shy. (His book is peppered with epigrams, a habit occasionally seen as pomposity, but which I think might be an intellectual modesty.) Between Christmas, when he started writing, and February 13, when he sent Faber his manuscript, he maintained a monastic existence at the British School in Rome, where he had won a fellowship, and he is still there now, decompressing. Having obsessed over the news for almost a year, he hasn't read a physical copy of a newspaper or watched TV (his room doesn't have one) since he got there.

The book that came to be dominated by the disappearance of a three-year-old and the stepping-down of a prime minister was in fact conceived before either event, Burn says.

"I had dinner with Stephen Page [CEO of Faber], and that morning I'd had this idea about taking the Capote/Mailer non-fiction novel thing to its ultimate, which would also involve how things have changed with rolling news. The idea was to find a story, and the moment the news explosion happened to go there and write about it, turn it into a novel in the way that happens all the time through rolling news, newspapers, blogging. And to turn it around fast, so that the novel came out while the news coverage was still fresh in people's minds.

"So you have a strange 3D effect of reading my version of the story as a novel, when in fact you have seen and heard and read the other versions of the same story. And the truth would have to be somewhere in the middle."

The problem was that while he read the papers and watched TV obsessively, the right story never seemed to present itself. The missing toddler in Portugal, initially, at least, seemed wrong. For a while he considered writing about Jade Goody and the Big Brother race row. He couldn't shake Blair, though, and at one point, in a eureka moment, called his publishers to announce: "I think I've got the story. Sedgefield byelection: the novel."

Instead (perhaps mercifully), as the summer went on, Burn discovered that after Blair and, in a different way, after Madeleine, it is impossible to consume news unselfconsciously. If Blair and his court were the ultimate spinners of truth, Kate and Gerry McCann were the ultimate media-age victims, a desperately grieving couple who could nonetheless tell Vanity Fair: "Certainly we thought it was possible that [as a result of publicising Madeleine's eye defect] her abductor might do something to her eye ... But in terms of marketing, it was a good ploy." The plan of writing a straightforwardly fictionalised news event faded, and something more complex and ambiguous emerged in its place.

It was fortuitously timed, all the same. The soggy summer of 2007 did represent a significant moment, Burn believes. "The New Labour lot, all they had to sell was presentation in many ways. And because of that, [after their departure] people became much more alert. And obviously this has coincided with the explosion on the web, and mobile contact: instantly texting and sending and photographing."

A lot of people felt like the confused girl on YouTube, he thinks. "Blair was such a strange, spectral figure that when he went, it was like, after being in your face for 10 years, he just evaporated. And the nakedness of the Brown people, in terms of their naivety to PR and so on - I found it embarrassing in a way. After Campbell and Mandelson and Blair, who could smile in the face of anything, it was like watching some terrible play where you think, 'Oh God, they are going to forget their lines in a moment and he's going to be sick he's so nervous.' It led to an incredible unease, I think, without people being able to put their finger on what it was."

As he struggles to make sense of it all, the Burn character travels to the new PM's constituency home in Fife, where he is stopped by armed police and asked his business. "He told them that this was proving to be a summer of disappearances, absences, some voluntary, others not; that he was interested in the idea of absence, of erasure and self-erasure." Unsurprisingly, they send him packing, and he doesn't really find his answers. Ultimately, this is a novel about the failure to fictionalise the news.

Burn's own background might be the stuff of a novel in itself. He was born in the "poor but respectable, rough-and-ready, raggy-arsed west end of Newcastle". Gordon, his mother, father and grandmother lived on the upper floor of a small terraced house; downstairs were his uncle's family. The toilet was outside. A bookish only child - "'He's a big reader' wasn't necessarily a compliment where I was growing up," he has written - he passed his 11-plus, one of only two from his year to go to grammar school. By the time he was 16 he was hanging out with a collection of self-styled bohemians in a medieval turret in the centre of town, until it was time to go and do his homework.

He kept trying to get a job as a local reporter with Thompson newspapers, and kept being told to do A-levels, then a degree. When he graduated, he went to see them again.

"When I was a student I never got a student job. Not because I didn't need the money, but every summer I went to America. I would get these cheap Greyhound bus tickets, $99 for 99 days, and you would meet people and stay with them, or just sleep on the buses. So when I had this interview at 21, they said, 'Don't you think you should have had a job?' And I said something chippy like, 'What, work in a frozen pea factory in Hull like everyone I was in college with? I don't need to go to work in a factory to find out about the workers! My family are workers! I don't need all that crap!'"

He didn't get the job. As it happens, he didn't need it. The following day he knocked on the door of Norman Cornish, a self-taught artist from the local pits, and asked to interview him. The local paper published it, as, later, did the Guardian. Soon he was writing regularly for Rolling Stone. Aside from his novels and non-fiction books, he has gone on to carve a distinguished career as a sports columnist and art critic, notably of the Young British Artists.

Being on the other side of the tape recorder is uncomfortable, he says. After he spoke to a Guardian interviewer in 1995, he recalls, "my mother cried for days. I ended up crying on the phone too. [The interviewer] hadn't twisted anything, but I was so keen to establish my credentials, surrounded by the Martin Amises and the Ian McEwans, I was like, 'We were really poor! My mother was a cleaner!' And she hated that. It was incredibly unthinking of me." Both his parents are now dead.

Does it make him pause when he writes about others? If celebrity is a small death, doesn't the writer, by contributing to the volume of material about a person, in a way contribute to their corruption? "I've written incredibly cutting things when I was younger, but only about well-known people. I've never written anything bad about people who haven't put themselves up for it."

Is that the get-out? "I think it is. And the get-out in this case is that it's a novel. It's all about speculation. It's about seeing Gordon Brown not as Gordon Brown the prime minister, but as this slightly odd person. The same with Gerry McCann in a way. Someone who has been in the papers, on the TV, and invited it on themselves. The McCanns weren't being used by the press, - unusually, they were using the press for their own admirable ends. At the beginning, I think. And I just think any person who does enter consciousness in that way ... you think things. You perhaps wouldn't write everything you think, but I think you should feel free to speculate."

Unusually, whereas few people who write about the media can resist some form of moralising about it, Burn isn't terribly interested in drawing a lesson. At one point he says, "I guess if you wanted to be po-faced, you could say there has been a dilution in the quality of news," but I don't think he really believes it. Instead, we are inhabiting "a new reality, and I think it's actually quite exciting".

Which is not to say that Burn's take is amoral; his conclusion is rather bravely sentimental. But while it might seem that all these connections between news stories hint at some larger, overarching meaning, he knows there is none.

"The news is always holding out the promise that we will know more and more and more, but we don't. With the West case, I had everything: I had access to their belongings, to the police interviews - everything, basically, that you could possibly wish to get - and you spend three years writing a book, and you still don't know what made these two people do the kind of things that they did."

In this, Burn argues, fiction doesn't offer any more answers than journalism - but perhaps it is more honest in that it doesn't claim to.